Misconnected
Savant
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2012
- Messages
- 587
Myself and a couple of others are kind of working on a homebrewed version of the 40K RPG. To the uninitiated, it's essentially the same as WFRP, and to the even more uninitiated, it's not vastly different from D&D3e.
One of our major issues with the system is how injuries are handled. It essentially has 3 different kinds.
Fatigue levels gives you a non-cumulative 10% penalty to everything, your max fatigue is equal to your Toughness (think Constitution in D&D). Beyond max fatigue, you pass out for a brief period.
Wounds is Hit Points by another name. The only notable difference between D&D HP and 40K RPG Wounds, is that while the magnitude of inflicted damage is close to identical, Wound pools stay within the 15-30 range in the 40K RPG.
Critical Injuries are "real" injuries and come in 10 different levels of severity. Basically, critical injuries are stuff like getting your arm broken or your head cut off. The former would be something like a level 3 injury, the latter a level 8 injury.
...
What we'd like is something akin to the Critical Injury system alone, but not so hideously cumbersome that you have to every injury up on a table and spend an hour noting down the effects on your charsheet.
Present thinking is to have damage have cause 1 injury, regardless of the magnitude. Injuries will stack, and each injury will cause a loss of -10 points of Toughness (think constitution -2), as well as a loss of -10 of one or more other Characteristics (think Ability Scores), depending on the hit location (head = loss of Per/WP, body = loss of player chosen, legs = loss of Ag, arms = loss of WS/BS).
That's reasonably simple. Getting a leg injury, for example, means you can take fewer injuries over all and that you'll move slower (Agility -10, or movement & Dexterity penalties, if you prefer). As far keeping up the pace and having injuries actually be bad, this concept works flawlessly. It's a bit more lethal than the 40K RPG, but not so much that anyone is going to get killed by just one or two unlucky dice rolls.
The problem is that I do like at least slightly variable damage, and I do like the occasional elaborate critical "bad guy's chest explodes, impaling nearest minion with shards of ribcage" injury.
Our present concept doesn't have leeway for variable damage, and scaling the modifiers wouldn't really fix that. It would just make the system overly random.
There's no particular reason Critical Injuries can't be incorporated, but so far none of us have thought of a neat way to do it. My own suggestion is that if the damage done to the character exceeds the character's current Toughness (think Constitution... again), the character suffers +1 level of Critical Injury from the relevant table. I don't know whether the idea works, but I guess we'll be trying it out in two weeks.
...
Point of this long-ass rant? Well, I'd like thoughts, criticism, ideas, suggestions and whatever the hell else you guys might feel like contributing.
Oh and, if you happen to have any great concepts for jobs that expendable little acolytes of the Inquisition might do as part of their cover, I'd love to hear all about those too.
One of our major issues with the system is how injuries are handled. It essentially has 3 different kinds.
Fatigue levels gives you a non-cumulative 10% penalty to everything, your max fatigue is equal to your Toughness (think Constitution in D&D). Beyond max fatigue, you pass out for a brief period.
Wounds is Hit Points by another name. The only notable difference between D&D HP and 40K RPG Wounds, is that while the magnitude of inflicted damage is close to identical, Wound pools stay within the 15-30 range in the 40K RPG.
Critical Injuries are "real" injuries and come in 10 different levels of severity. Basically, critical injuries are stuff like getting your arm broken or your head cut off. The former would be something like a level 3 injury, the latter a level 8 injury.
...
What we'd like is something akin to the Critical Injury system alone, but not so hideously cumbersome that you have to every injury up on a table and spend an hour noting down the effects on your charsheet.
Present thinking is to have damage have cause 1 injury, regardless of the magnitude. Injuries will stack, and each injury will cause a loss of -10 points of Toughness (think constitution -2), as well as a loss of -10 of one or more other Characteristics (think Ability Scores), depending on the hit location (head = loss of Per/WP, body = loss of player chosen, legs = loss of Ag, arms = loss of WS/BS).
That's reasonably simple. Getting a leg injury, for example, means you can take fewer injuries over all and that you'll move slower (Agility -10, or movement & Dexterity penalties, if you prefer). As far keeping up the pace and having injuries actually be bad, this concept works flawlessly. It's a bit more lethal than the 40K RPG, but not so much that anyone is going to get killed by just one or two unlucky dice rolls.
The problem is that I do like at least slightly variable damage, and I do like the occasional elaborate critical "bad guy's chest explodes, impaling nearest minion with shards of ribcage" injury.
Our present concept doesn't have leeway for variable damage, and scaling the modifiers wouldn't really fix that. It would just make the system overly random.
There's no particular reason Critical Injuries can't be incorporated, but so far none of us have thought of a neat way to do it. My own suggestion is that if the damage done to the character exceeds the character's current Toughness (think Constitution... again), the character suffers +1 level of Critical Injury from the relevant table. I don't know whether the idea works, but I guess we'll be trying it out in two weeks.
...
Point of this long-ass rant? Well, I'd like thoughts, criticism, ideas, suggestions and whatever the hell else you guys might feel like contributing.
Oh and, if you happen to have any great concepts for jobs that expendable little acolytes of the Inquisition might do as part of their cover, I'd love to hear all about those too.